Monday, December 12, 2016

Thin-Skinned Monarchs, Ugly Doublets, War-Bears on the March: News from the Hill Cantons

And now the News from the Hill Cantons...

Late Sunlorday residents of Marlinko
were surprised by the sudden plastering of a 72-panel wall-poster
onto the Tomb of the Town Gods-- penned no less by our most puissant
and august new Overking, Radulf II, himself. The surprisingly verbose
and sharply-worded jeremiad is a rebuke to the passing words by Mavo
the Elder, a local junior master in the Illustrious Workers of Wood.

Mavo in comments at his guild meeting had stated “for the record”
that the new monarch's claims that a 1,100 foot-high wooden scaffold
would be constructed for the overking's Build the Ziggurat project
was “a physical impossibility with our current construction
methods.” After 48 panels of detailed derisive comments leveled
against every individual member of Mavo's kin for 13 generations, our
beloved monarch gently corrected the record with a firm and dignified
assessment that He is in fact “quite amazing in his mastery of
zigguartry and civil engineering...and that a single wart on my dog's
teat has more comprehension of these matters than Mavo has learned in
his lifetime.”

A showdown in the petty kingdom of
Pohansko seems eminent. Riders from the eastern wilds say that two of
three columns of war-bears are now in striking distance of the little
client state after mastodon-ambush and cave-exploration delays along
the way.

Break out the ugly velvet doublets and
mustard yellow cloaks of mourning for the Sunlord is nearing his
annual wintry vacation with the dead Hyperborean gods.
Traditionalists are warning Cantoners not to go soft on the
time-cherished practice of taking a favored toy of the children in
their lives and replacing them with burned beets. “Spare the beets,
spoil the child.”

Goatherds in the hills north of Revoca
town have noticed a “totally unremarkable and hitherto unfound
small valley choked with green tube like plants and slender clusters
of rusting iron pagodas.” Surely the slivovce is flowing early and
freely in that Canton this time of year.